


cycles

by falterth



Category: Naruto
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Gods and Goddesses, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Reincarnation, no real plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 19:49:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15493380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falterth/pseuds/falterth
Summary: Like infinity, like clockwork, there are always a few odd shinobi born to every generation.Powerful, all with a little tinge of madness or desperation to them, all fitting into some sort of ancient role, feeling and knowing andbeing.





	cycles

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I’ve had this one in the works for a while. I wanted to tell a story where I assigned Greek gods to a Naruto character based on how I thought they would fit, and this is what happened. I have a lot of feelings about this fic—it might be one of my favorite ones, actually—and would appreciate if you guys read it. It was a pretty emotional ride for me at least, and there was a lot that didn’t make it in.

Even before the massacre, even before all of his vows to kill his brother, Sasuke is born with a voice crooning _revenge_ into his ears.

“He had it coming,” is what he spits when he’s dragged kicking and screaming away from a nasty fight he’d gotten into at the academy. The other boy had been rushed to the hospital by a livid—and frightened—teacher. 

“Just getting even,” is what he says when he’s found covered in blood in a dark alley. The body of a civilian man is slumped against a cracked and fading brick wall, and Sasuke is sitting next to it, satisfied smile curling up on his face. “He deserved it.”

Uchiha Mikoto and Uchiha Fugaku are silently, breathlessly horrified.

(“You need—” Mikoto had started, and then she’d faltered because she hadn’t wanted to say _help_ to her own son, hadn’t wanted to condemn him like that.

“Help?” Sasuke had asked, and she’d bitten her lip.

“Yes,” Mikoto had confessed. “I think—you—violence like this is . . . not normal." 

And having to say that had ripped a gaping hole in her chest.

“I don’t need help,” he’d snarled. “ _They_ do.”

“They?”

“People who think they can get away with things. People who let their ego get the better of them. People who don’t know that what comes around goes around.”

That had been the end of that conversation.)

They _try_ to have him put in therapy, but Sasuke is completely impervious to any and _all_ methods of trying to stop him.

They consider destroying his chakra pathways, with the help of a Hyūga—who, really, would be all too eager to maim one of the Uchiha—but Fugaku decides that allowing Sasuke to become a shinobi may redirect some of his destructive energy.

Mikoto isn’t convinced, and from the look on her husband’s face, neither is Fugaku.

Against their better judgment, they keep Sasuke in the academy and cancel his appointments with his therapist. 

They fear for what Sasuke may become.

He grows up with a swath of like-minded children. There’s a girl with silver eyes that seem to pierce right through him. A boy that makes everything he touches glow. A girl that picks apart the academy curriculum and goes on a warpath to change the system, although from what he sees it doesn’t work.

Four quiet children, none of them knowing just what to do with their lives but all with a single goal—to experience.

Sasuke grows up hated by his peers. He grows up with scraped and bloody knuckles from brawling.

He’s eight years old when his brother kills the whole clan.

Eight years old when he falls into an endless cycle of revenge.

Eight years old when something deep inside of him awakens and he throws his life away to even out the playing field.

He grows up in the dark, path illuminated by nothing, and sits quietly through eight years of his life.

Only two things will ever matter again:

The moment he kills his brother, and the moment a girl with silver eyes and wolf furs draped across her shoulders shoots him through the heart with a silver arrow and whispers to him from across the battlefield, “Got you, Nemesis.”

 

* * *

  

Hyūga Hinata is born with silver eyes. Not the pale lavender that is standard for every Hyūga, but a color that makes her eyes seem like twin full moons. Hiashi has to question the legitimacy of her birth, but after some tests are run, he is of the knowledge that Hinata is undoubtedly a full-blooded Hyūga. 

From the day she is born, she displays an unusual intelligence and grace.

Hinata picks up a bow one day and in a week becomes the greatest archer Konoha’s ever seen. She is five years old when she does it.

Hiashi approaches her about starting the academy early—it’s not really an option, as both he and the elders are expecting her to attend, but she does refuse. 

“No, father,” she says, out on the archery range that the Hyūga had built for her and her alone, “I will not attend early. There is something I must see to, and my hunt is not yet over.”

Hiashi wants to scream at her, _What hunt?_ _What is more important than making your clan proud?_

But that would make Hinata angry, and an angry Hinata is a Hinata that goes missing from the compound for days, an angry Hinata is plumes of smoke in the distance and an angry Hinata is training targets demolished by silver arrows infused with chakra. 

So Hiashi nods and lets her refuse, and he bears the brunt of the elders’ anger when he comes to them telling them of his failure. 

Hinata awakens her Byakugan when she is five and a half years old. She marvels at its powers and disappears on a week-long hunting trip that very day. Hiashi tells her that he expects her to learn the Gentle Fist, and to put down the bow and arrow someday and join the rest of her clan. 

She looks at him with those strange, silver eyes, veins on her face emphasized and ugly and in that moment she looks _everything_ like a shinobi should, and there is none of the little-girl softness he’d always seen in her before.

She is barely five years and six months old, and Hiashi is already beginning to treat her as he would an adult.

“Of course, father,” she says tonelessly, posture immaculate, following the rules to the letter like they’re the law that governs her entire life. “I will learn your teachings. But if you think that I will abandon the hunt—you may think again." 

Hiashi bites down his angry reply and nods, and opens the door of the compound to let her out.

He teaches her the Gentle Fist when she comes back—and she comes back in a blaze of silver and draped with wolf-furs and she looks _right._  

It’s no surprise that she excels in it, no surprise that she’s light and fluid and everything the style accompanies.

Hinata treats the training like she would a hunt—she focuses her entire being on learning her clan’s style, wastes no time playing games or frolicking about with children her own age—and within a year, she’s mastered as much of it as she physically can. 

Hinata grows up with a certain sense that she will have to hunt down people one day. She knows all her targets on sight, and the moment she lays eyes on a boy with blood streaked across his face dragged kicking and screaming away from someone who is barely recognizable as _human_ on the ground—she knows that there’s an arrow with his name written on its shaft waiting in her quiver. She doesn’t know when she’ll pull it out, but she knows that she has never missed a shot in her life.

 

* * *

 

Gaara is born an instrument of mindless death, a lord of darkness.

He is: a curtain of bloody sand in the middle of the night.

He is: the fear on his siblings’ faces.

He is: Yashamaru, feeling disgusted with himself before the assassination attempt, and Yashamaru feeling _relieved_ as he’s dying because he doesn’t have to _lie_ anymore.

He is: Rasa, the Kazekage, looking out over his village and _regretting._  

He is: Gaara, the _son_ of the Kazekage, living in a spacious prison and surrounded by the finest that his poor country can offer and still feeling like it’s not _enough._

He is: Rinko, the seal-master of Suna, feeling that her skills are inadequate and being _right,_ and hastily drawing a broken seal onto a red-haired infant and _knowing_ that she’s created a monster. 

He is: never sleeping, needing to sleep but never being _able_ to.

He is: remembering each and every person he’s killed and telling himself that they make him feel alive and denying that they’re killing him just as much.

He is: feeling like there’s acid running through his veins, feeling that he’s growing sick and sicker of life by the second.

He is: surrounded by death like four walls on every side.

He is: never being touched, skin like sand and skin like he’s been bathed in the River Styx and there is no weak point except for his _mind,_ which no one dares to approach. 

He is all of these and more.

 

* * *

 

Kakashi is nine years old, a year after his father guts himself with his favorite sword, three years before Obito dies, three years before he kills a little girl named Rin, when he first pulls lightning from the sky. 

It’s not a jutsu. 

He’s never needed hand-seals to make lightning before. It obeys him on some spiritual level, and it _talks_ to him. Not in words or anything so simple like that, but it speaks feelings and impressions directly into his mind, such as: 

Power.

Adrenaline.

Avoidance.

It charges him up and _wants_ to charge him up, obeys his every command like an eager puppy. But it brings out the worst in him at the same time, problems that were already in existence but that have been exacerbated, such as:  
  
Avoidance. He’s never _there._  

He doesn’t take things seriously. He always finds something else do do, is always distracted by something, is always— _lost._  

And he knows this, but the lightning doesn’t, and he knows he should abandon this but he _doesn’t_ because he _can’t._  

It’s an ancient instinct. Kakashi is not sure that he will ever be able to shake it.

His hair is the same grey as storm-clouds. His eyes, jet-black during the day, glow in the dark, electric-blue and powerful. Some say that it’s because of his lightning affinity. Others say that—

Well. He doesn’t listen to what others say. There has always been a distinction between him and them (others), some separation of power that feels right and just, and Kakashi knows this because the lightning told him so. 

He’s twelve—three years after he first calls power out of the sky, a month before Obito will be crushed by rocks that he couldn’t avoid, and four months before he becomes Friend-Killer Kakashi—when he manages to hold it in his hand.

Chidori, he names it, thinking of its lightness and grace and gentle chirping, and the lightning rejects, because it isn’t birds, it isn’t something so weak that it uses wings to fly, and its sound is the sound of pure energy collected, a low buzz of excitement, _not_ birds. Not birds.

Kakashi doesn’t name the technique, but others do.

Raikiri, they say, and the lightning thrashes around and _hates_ but Kakashi can’t stop the talking. 

He doesn’t name the technique.

He curses it instead, when he forces his sensei to kill a man for him and when he drives his electrified hand through the chest of a little girl named Nohara Rin. His only original technique to date, and all it’s good for is giving him grief.

Friend-Killer Kakashi, they call him, and he misses it when they didn’t call him anything.

He’s fourteen, a day after the Kyuubi no Kitsune destroys half the town and takes his teacher with it, when he first breathes lightning.

It burns him up. He screams when he does it because it’s so painful and raw and _exhilarating._ It’s a splash of white-hot electricity against the night sky, it’s a swath of burning brush in a clearing just outside the village. It’s a technique he uses once and then doesn’t use for almost a decade after that first night, when he cries until he’s got nothing left to cry and he crackles until he feels like the whole of Konoha is standing on end. 

He’s seventeen, three years after Minato dies, when he _rides_ lightning.

He’s sick of going to the memorial stone and staring at names that have started to mean absolutely nothing to him, sick of looking at people and not being _acknowledged,_ sick of never being there—and he raises his right arm and expects to have a bolt in his hand, expects energy and lightning-blue and pure _quickness_ writing around his arm, expects to have something to throw at a forest—and instead the lightning brings him up. 

It’s not painful this time. It seems like it can forgive him. He doesn’t know if he can ever forgive it. 

Lightning kisses his cheeks and he thinks about a little girl with clan markings on her cheeks and a man that Minato-sensei had to kill for him. Lightning curls up under his legs, crooning and caressing and _possessive,_ and he closes his eyes and tries to forget everything else for just a day.

 

* * *

 

Sakura’s mothers are scared of her. 

It isn’t their fault. No, it’s hardly their fault.

It is difficult to not be afraid when one’s daughter looks one in the eye and tells one why the shinobi system as it is is destroying everyone caught in it. Why the Hokage is a fool, and why one of the most powerful ninja born to Konoha defected. Probably.

Sakura isn’t so sure on the last one, only because she’s four years old and doesn’t have access to S-rank secrets yet.

And that brings up the question of how she even knew of the Snake Sannin’s existence in the first place, although that is easily explained when she pulls out several thick history tomes, at least three of which should not be available to her. Information about Orochimaru is present in all of them, but the only information about their desertion is unanimous across all books: “Defected from the village.”

When Harue asks her how she got the books, she says that the security in the library is quite honestly lacking and that it was ridiculously easy to break into the B-rank and A-rank archives.

Sakura wants to change things.

Harue thinks this is a good goal, and supports her from the background, even if she doesn’t understand everything that goes through her little girl’s mind.

Mimori, who has been loyal to Konoha from the start, is more wary. But she doesn’t say anything because she _wants_ to trust her daughter.

A month later, Sakura finds out about Uzushio and is enraged. Her fury is cold and blankets the entire house and makes her mothers shiver from time to time. Her fury comes in the form of sharp remarks about the village that make Mimori want to yell and scream in frustration and tell her daughter that that’s _treason,_ she can’t just _do_ that— 

But she does.

She demands an audience with the Hokage and beats him over the head with her words, and comes out with cold fire blazing in her eyes.

“In the future,” she promises, holding Harue’s hand as they walk back home, “nothing like this will _ever_ happen again. I’m going to take over this awful excuse of a village and I’m going to tear it down and rebuild it. I swear.” 

Harue believes that Sakura has enough will to change the entire world, if only she wanted to.

 

* * *

 

Naruto is hard to look at.

He’s born bright and lovely, with all of the fire Kushina had in her and all of the sunshine smiles that Minato had in him. He giggles to himself in the crib even when nobody is in the room with him. He is delighted with the simplest of things, and he casts light on everything he touches.

People don’t let him touch them, so they watch in horror as he touches his bedsheets and they glow golden, gets his little hands on the bars of his crib and leaves splashes of yellow light on them. 

He is the demon-child, the fox, the thing that almost wiped the whole village out.

But he smiles, and is delighted, and sometimes they don’t know what to do with him.

Naruto grows up with the Will of Fire roaring inside of him, and his dream reaches farther than the stars:

He wants to fill the village with love and hope and daylight and everything else good. He wants to shine so brightly that everyone will love him. 

And if he has to become the Hokage to do so, then he will.

 

* * *

 

Gekkō Hayate and Shiranui Genma are two sides of the same coin.

Hayate is born with a cough, and he is destined to dance away from the clutching jaws of sleep each night until his legs wear out and his chest heaves and he _must_ give in. He’s born into a life that will be sawed painfully and slowly short someday. 

Healers have tried their hand at curing him. 

He’s earned a sort of reputation as the perpetually sick tokujō that nobody can fix. 

Tsunade herself comes to place her hands on his chest and heal him, and after two hours everyone else is let into his hospital room and he shouldn’t even be there because he wasn’t healed, there’s nothing for him to recover from since they _can’t_ heal him. He sits there looking miserable, coughs wracking his body, and Tsunade sits there looking furious, saying that if only she’d gotten to it before it had gotten this bad, if only she’d seen him when he was a child then she could have _done_ something—

But she had not been there.

Gekkō Hayate is considered a lost cause.

He accepts these words, sitting there on the hospital bed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes (although that never works, never has and never will), quietly and with a single, slow nod.

Hayate himself has long accepted this. It’s why he goes out of his way to avoid friendship. His misery translates to everyone else. People around him are weighed down.

“Cheer up, Hayate,” someone had said to him once.

Hayate can’t cheer up.

His entire existence hurts these days. 

Genma, though, is born into a clan that manufactures poisons. A clan that manufactures sickness and death. He takes to it well, better than anyone else in the clan, really, and the clan head—who took him in when his parents died during a poisons slip-up—is in equal measures proud and concerned. 

Genma, from the tender age of six, is already mixing advanced poisons with the best of them. He knows more than thirty ways to poison someone, from summons to food to kissing. His hands are absolutely steady when he mixes ingredients.

The only incident that has ever happened while Genma had been around hadn’t been his fault. Someone had been helping Genma—much to the boy’s protests—with a particularly complex poison, and _that_ person had knocked over a vial of dust that, if breathed in, overloaded the nervous system, causing seizures and ending in death. Genma’s partner had gotten a huge lungful of the stuff in and had died that day. 

The clan head had found Genma standing in the middle of the dust cloud, breathing it in and being _fine._

Since then, Genma’s ingested every single poison belonging to the clan.

None of them have affected him in the slightest.

Some have hopes that the Shiranui clan has finally produced a bloodline, that all their work has finally paid off, and Genma is considered somewhat of a hero among the clan. He certainly advances through the ranks quickly, and since the clan head cannot have children, she’s slotted him in to become the next leader. 

Genma takes the news calmly.

He’s always been a quiet boy, the clan head muses, always alone and isolated with his poisons and his antidotes. 

She thinks that a position of power will do the kid some good.

 

* * *

 

Kushina is born during the high tide, during a storm that shakes the foundations of Uzushio. 

She grows up in the rain, in the sea. She grows up in the water where she can clap her hands and a wave will rise to meet her. She grows up knee-deep in the salty ocean, stray bits of seaweed clinging to her ankles. She grows up talking to vicious whirlpools that an experienced shinobi wouldn’t dare come near.

She grows up with hair as red as an ocean sunset, red and redder than fresh blood.

The village tells her that she has the most powerful water release since—since _nobody,_ since hers is the most powerful anyone’s ever seen. Kushina doesn’t care about that. She only cares about the affairs of the sea, what the sea can give her and what she can give to the sea. 

Kushina can create a ten-foot wall of water with a slight waving of her hand.

She sets her sights on the Uzukage position, and the next week she’s brought in to see Uzumaki Mito. 

She leaves the room trembling, face as red as her hair, legs shaking with exhaustion and a tailed beast in her gut.

That night, Uzushiogakure is hit with one of the hardest storms she’s had to bear since Kushina was born. Nobody blames the girl herself, but she’s shipped off to Konoha within the year. 

Kushina isn’t there to see the fall of her home village.

She’s at the academy instead, being teased about her hair and her tomboyishness and her everything because it’s not Konoha—she’s Uzushio down to the bone.

When she hears about her village’s fall, she floods Konoha and earns a spot in a T&I chair for a month. She’s never quite the same after that—she’s a little more bloodthirsty, a little quicker to lash out with her fabled water whips, a little quicker to kill. 

Uzumaki Kushina does not see Uzushiogakure overrun with enemies, does not see people drowning in their own blood, does not see the tens of ships docked all around the little island. 

She grows up instead, thigh-deep in the rivers that run in the forest of Konoha, catching fish with her bare hands, strands of red hair hanging limply by her sides.

She grows up with water in her veins, the red thread of fate turned burgundy, an orange beast in her gut that burns fiery and hot and she’s two forces clashing, fire and water, and she’s quiet nights spent with the Namikaze kid, reading books about the ocean or staring at the glassy surface of the pond behind her house, and she’s earth-shaking spars against the Uchiha girl, ripping up training grounds and crying and screaming her fury and _missing_ everything that’s lost to her. 

Uzumaki Kushina is a hurricane, is the sea, is rivers.

She’s long years of looking for something to be and then finding it. She’s going to be the Hokage, and she’s going to be a damn good one.

She fights a war with the ocean rushing through her blood. She is surrounded by water at all times, and she wields it like a mace, all heavy hits and sharp edges and pain and fury and flow. She fights a war and she unleashes the Kyuubi, gets drunk on his power and wipes out whole fields of enemy nin. 

She leaves behind her whips and lashes out with waves. She’s tired of having to fine-tune everything she does, so she lets her chakra bleed out of her, monstrous and tinged with a little bit of madness, and she slams it into her enemies and grins and grins and _grins._  

When the war ends, she marries the Namikaze kid because she’s a sucker for pretty people, and because they’d been nice enough to not run away after they’d seen her in battle. When the war ends, she walks into the old geezer’s office and tells him her dream. 

The old man smiles and Kushina thinks, _yes, I’m finally going to do it, I’m finally going to be able to protect._  

He sends her on a year-long mission to smoke out the Kiri-nin still staying in Fire Country, and says he trusts _her_ to finally end things, to make sure that the war doesn’t try to rear its bloodied and broken head again. She leaves the village, head held high and blood pumping, and she goes out and does her mission and leaves a bloody path in her wake.

When she returns, it’s to the sight of Namikaze Minato in the Hokage’s hat. It feels like a punch to the gut, and she screams at them for hours after she gets home, homicidal rage making her lose herself.

“It was _my_ dream!” She yells, tears dripping down her cheeks and a power that she doesn’t quite understand swelling up in her ribcage. (The ocean doesn't like to be restrained.) “I need to protect this village! It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s—” 

They barely get a word in edgewise, until the tail end of her rant when they say, “I didn’t want it either,” and she breathes out, forces herself to relax and ask them, “So why the hell did you take it?” 

“Hiruzen is dead. Orochimaru got him while you were away—they probably figured that with you gone, nobody would stand a chance against ‘em.”

“And they were _right,_ damn them,” Kushina says. 

She works out a compromise with Minato. 

A week later, she’s wearing that damn hat on her head. Uzumaki Kushina is the Godaime Hokage, and that ocean in her blood has calmed down just a bit for it.


End file.
